Laparoscopic and endoscopic procedures are conducted through a small incision in the skin or natural body orifices.
In order to operate on a given tissue or a blood vessel, surgeons must ligate or occlude blood vessels to prevent patient blood loss. Surgical clip appliers are used in these surgeries for the application of hemostatic clips to ligate vessels. Clip appliers hold a surgical clip in an open position in a pair of specially adapted jaws. Once these jaws, containing clips, are positioned over a vessel, the clip is manually released over the vessel to ligate it. Inaccuracies in movement or failure to securely occlude the clip to the vessel can result damage to vessels or tissues, internal bleeding, lethal drops in blood pressure, infections, or longer recovery periods
These instruments need to provide precise and accurate movement in order to ligate vessels within the body that are difficult to access. Instruments are needed that are narrow enough to be inserted through a small opening (such as an incision, trocar or natural body orifice), long enough to reach the desired internal tissues, and flexible enough to provide a wide range of motion to navigate the distal end of a clip applier with jaws containing loaded clips around body tissues to advance towards the internal operation site.
Accordingly, the subject invention discloses an improved steerable articulating surgical clip applier. It contains a long, narrow, distal articulating disposable portion that is inserted into a patient during surgery. This distal articulating portion is removably attached to a proximal non-disposable control unit for moving the long disposable portion within the patient and operating actuators to control the articulation and ligation of the clip applier.
By separating these two components, the risk of cross contamination between separate patients or separate tissues on the same patient is reduced. The non-disposable control unit does not enter the patient and the contaminated long and narrow component is simply disposed after each surgical procedure is completed. In addition, costs are saved since medical providers only need to replace the disposable component between surgical procedures.